Saturday, November 08, 2008

waiting for someone to finish what a King began

Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few
are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope. Barack
Obama never talks about how people see him: I'm not the one making history, he said every chance he got. You are.
Yet as he looked out Tuesday night through the bulletproof glass, in a
park named for a Civil War general, he had to see the truth on people's
faces. We are the ones we've been waiting for, he liked to say, but
people were waiting for him, waiting for someone to finish what a King
began."If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place
where all things are possible," declared the President-elect, "who
still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who
still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." (See pictures of Barack Obama's victory celebration in Chicago.)Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor
did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in
the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken
before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its
own.

Remember this day, parents
told their children as they took them out of school to go see an
African-American candidate make history. An election in one of the
world's oldest democracies looked like the kind they hold in brand-new
ones, when citizens finally come out and dance, a purple-thumb day, a
velvet revolution. A hundred thousand people came out in red states to
hear Obama; a hundred fifty thousand turned out in purple ones, even
after all this time, when they should have been sick to death of Hope
and Change. In Michigan, people put an electric fence around their yard
sign to protect it. NASA astronauts on board the International Space
Station sent a video message encouraging people to vote; they did, from
200 miles up. A judge in Ohio ruled that homeless people could use a
park bench as their address in order to register. A couple flew home
from India just to cast their ballots. Obama's Ohio volunteers knocked
on a million doors on Monday alone. That night, a Florida official
locked himself in the Seminole County election headquarters and slept
overnight with the ballots to make sure nothing went wrong with the
vote. Early-voting lines in Atlanta were 10 hours long, and still
people waited, as though their vote was their most precious and
personal possession at a moment when everything else seemed to be
losing its value. You heard the same phrases everywhere. First time ever. In my lifetime. Whatever it takes. (See pictures from the historic Election Day.)When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a
ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme
Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the
biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona
Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed
since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new
voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the
old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well
past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia
and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the
Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk
from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state.
After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past
with ease.The victory poured down the ballot, bringing along a larger Democratic
majority in both houses, though not as broad as some had predicted:
Democrats widened their margins in the House and the Senate. The
Republican caucus is smaller, more male and whiter at a time when the
electorate is heading the other way. But the Democrats did not come
close to their dream of a 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the
Senate, which suggests that people's hunger for change is tempered by
their faith in restraint. (Read "Congressional Races to Watch '08".)When the race was called, there was a rush of noise, of horns honking
and kids shouting and strangers hugging in the streets. People danced
in Harlem and wept at Ebenezer Baptist Church and lit candles at Dr.
King's grave. More than a thousand people shouted "Yes we can!" outside
the White House, where a century ago it was considered scandalous for a
President to invite a black hero to lunch. The Secret Service said it
had never seen anything like it. President Bush called the victory
"awesome" when he phoned Obama to congratulate him: "You are about to
go on one of the great journeys of life."John McCain, freedom fighter, has always seen the nobility even — maybe
especially — in a losing battle, which takes the most courage to fight.
When he called Obama to concede the race, the younger man honored the
elder statesman. "I need your help," Obama said, and McCain offered it
without reservation. "Whatever our differences, we are fellow
Americans," McCain told the crowd in a gracious speech beneath the
Arizona mountains. "I pledge to him tonight to do all in my power to
help him lead us through the many challenges we face." (See pictures of John McCain's campaign farewell.)Remember this day. We now get
to imagine, at least for a while, that the election of Obama has not
just turned a page in our politics but also tossed out the whole book
so we can start over. Whether by design or by default, the past now
loses power: for the moment, it feels as if we've left behind the
baby-boomer battles of the past 40 years; the culture wars that took us
prisoner and cut us off from what we have in common; the tribal warfare
between rich and poor, North and South, black and white; and the
illusion, if anyone still harbored it after the past eight years, that
what happens in Washington does not affect what happens everywhere
else.How He Rewrote The Book"She has gone home," Obama told the quiet crowd in Charlotte, N.C., on Monday night, recalling the grandmother, who had raised him and shaped him and died on the eve of his victory.
"She was one of those quiet heroes that we have all across America," he
said, and tears we had never seen before streaked his face. "They're
not famous. Their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every
day, they work hard." One day later, Madelyn Dunham's grandson would be
the most famous man in the world. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)At a moment of obvious peril, America decided to place its fate in the
hands of a man who had been born to an idealistic white teenage mother
and the charismatic African grad student who abandoned them — a man who
grew up without money, talked his way into good schools, worked his way
up through the pitiless world of Chicago politics to the U.S. Senate
and now the White House in a stunningly short period. That achievement,
compared with those of the Bushes or the Kennedys or the Roosevelts or
the Adamses or any of the other American princes who were born into
power or bred to it, represents such a radical departure from the norm
that it finally brings meaning to the promise taught from kindergarten:
"Anyone can grow up to be President." (See 10 elections that changed America.)A nation doesn't much need a big President in small times; it needs one
when the future is spitting out monsters. We've heard so much about
Obama's brand-new voters that we easily forget the others he found, the
ones who hadn't voted since Vietnam or who had never dreamed they'd
vote for a black man or a liberal or a Democrat, much less all three.
But many Americans are living through the worst decade of their lives,
and they have anger-management issues. They saw a war mismanaged, a
city swallowed, now an economy held together with foreign loans and
thumbtacks. It took a perfect storm of bad news to create this moment,
but even the big men rarely win in a walk. Ronald Reagan didn't. John
Kennedy didn't. Those with the clearest vision often have to fight the
hardest for others to see things as they do.

Comments

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Interesting post and blog. Relevantly, many prominent experts and publications have pointed out that Obama is part of Generation Jones, born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and GenXers.
You may find this page interesting: it has, among other things, excerpts from publications like Newsweek and the New York Times, and videos with over 25 top pundits, all talking specifically about Obama’s identity as a GenJoneser:
http://www.generationjones.com/2008election.html